POEM - Listening With The Ear Of The Heart

And the toes 

shall they speak of it

in long and weary tones, the callused sentences 

hard like leather, moaning

at the endless search, the walking 

across sand and mud, the broken shells of sounds, 

fracturing coastal dunes,
demolishing the mountains 

of loves unfettered dreamscapes

I am in the heart, they said 

I am the soul of things, and the soul, shall

hear everything, bear witness to all expressions, 

of existences past and not yet past

and so, when I rub my ears, 

I taste the bitterness in things, in being,

and within the brief flutter of birds 

these consume my active hours. 

I eat nature for breakfast

the daily wittering, feeds on my flesh

I feel it, to the end of my fingertips, 

I touch wings mid flight across the open fields

the earthy granular matter of worms, insects 

and the love of snails, 

the slow whittling of my senses

from individuated loyalties 

to exchangeable impressions, 

qualities I can luxuriate in

I taste the touch, touch what I can hear

I hear the smells, smell what it tasted of

I see the sounds, the sound of what it felt like

I sense everything

simultaneously as colours,

music, a multiplicity of textures

interchangeable, as one feeds on and into another

aggregating into being all of them simultaneously 

in one singular drift, as though

a forethought of space and time 

I cannot exist for long, in inseparable sensations, 

from the indivisible then back again

to the isolate existence

if I am disconnected

am I no longer alive?

if I am not fluid

then what am I?

is what the cornfield confided

in a private memo.

Written September 2023
by Stephen Lumb